MAY 28, 2008

Honda enviously green

Honda Racing F1 has been granted ISO14001 certification, which means that it meets requirements for an environmental management system. This standard is applicable to any organization that wishes to implement, maintain and improve an environmental management system and demonstrates the team's commitment to running an environmentally-friendly business. It is the first time that the ISO14001 accreditation has been granted specifically to an F1 team and is an integral part of Honda's earthdreams programme, a commitment to taking specific action on environmental issues.

"Obtaining ISO14001 certification is not an easy thing for a Formula 1 team to achieve," said the team's chief executive Nick Fry. "However our earthdreams initiative is at the core of our team culture and it is important that we, like our project partners, strive to do our best to minimise our impact on the environment in the course of our business."

The team has been working towards achieving the certification for the last couple of years and is now working on specific targets to reduce its CO2 emissions.

"The fuel that we use to race and test our cars forms around only 1% of our CO2 emissions," says Fry. "The vast majority is from power use at our factory and air transportation of people and equipment around the world. This gives us some formidable challenges to reduce our consumption but we intend to see the same technology and ingenuity that we deploy on our F1 car to make a worthwhile contribution to reducing our CO2 emissions."

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) is a network of national standards institutes in 157 countries, which set and policed the requirements for certifications.